


i hurt (when you hurt)

by Nearly



Category: Check Please! (Webcomic)
Genre: Derek "Nursey" Nurse is Unchill, Light Angst, M/M, Mild Hurt/Comfort, Prompt Fic, Tumblr Prompt, dex is angry but we love him too, i love that thats a tag, its actually cute dont worry, nursey is a fool but we love him
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2019-08-05
Updated: 2019-08-05
Packaged: 2020-08-10 01:11:33
Rating: Not Rated
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,305
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/20126899
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Nearly/pseuds/Nearly
Summary: Nursey takes a check that wasn't for him, and Dex gets upset. Neither of them like to see the other get hurt, and they're both pretty bad at saying it.aka Nursey does something stupid, and Dex gets mad because he can't deal with his huge crush. The usual.





	i hurt (when you hurt)

**Author's Note:**

> I wrote this for a prompt on tumblr, asking me to use the line "What the hell were you thinking?" And then it turned into this. So here we are. 
> 
> Title is from Hurt Somebody by Noah Kahan, bc I love cliches.

Derek Malik Nurse is an idiot of the highest order, according to whatever Dex is spewing in his ear right now. He’s inclined to agree, as the buzz in his head fades enough for him to understand that he’s still sitting on the ice where he fell, after taking a check that wasn’t for him. He blinks, and Dex’s face swims into view above him, still glaring. 

“Get him out of here, Poindexter,” he thinks he hears one of the coaches say, and then he’s being hauled to his feet and pulled off the rink. He muddles through a visit with the team doctor, half in a daze, and hopes that Dex is writing all this medical stuff down because he’s definitely not going to remember it later.

They leave with a diagnosis of a minor concussion, because that’s what he gets for doing something stupid, and he’s not sure how they get back to the Haus but suddenly there they are, and Dex is helping him into a kitchen chair. His head has cleared now, for the most part, and he’s left with an aching bruise down half his face and a building headache, but he can think properly. Sort of. 

Dex moves away to get him an ice pack for his face. He hasn’t said anything since they left the rink, and that’s almost worse than all the yelling beforehand. Nursey doesn’t know how to deal with a situation where Dex isn’t talking to him. So he lays his head down on his folded arms, turns it to face where Dex is standing by the freezer, and for lack of anything better, says; “I’m an idiot.”

Dex straightens immediately, ice pack in hand. He’s glaring again, gaze piercing right into Nursey’s, jaw clenched. He’s stupidly gorgeous when he’s angry, Nursey thinks, and then mentally tells himself to chill. Now’s not the time, because now Dex is back at the table and pressing the ice pack to Nursey’s face, which feels fantastic, but Dex is still angry and he still isn’t saying anything. 

“What the hell were you thinking?” he says, finally, and Nursey can tell that he had to fight for it to come out evenly, almost quietly. He’s been working on his temper, and Nursey is weirdly proud of him for not shouting, even in a situation that honestly probably warrants a bit of that. He wants to tell him that, but he doesn’t. 

“I’m your d-man,” he mutters instead, shrugging lightly. “I’m supposed to watch your back.”

“You shouldn’t have even been on that section of the ice,” Dex pushes, not satisfied with the answer. “That wasn’t the play we talked about.” 

“I didn’t want you to get hurt,” Nursey admits, letting the words spill out without meaning to. Way to be cool, concussion brain. Dex bristles, jaw clenching harder than before, impossibly. 

“I know how to take a check, Nurse,” he seethes. “I can handle my hockey.” 

He drops the ice pack next to Nursey and pushes away from the table. Nursey, for once, hadn’t meant it as a chirp; he doesn’t really know what he meant, just knows that it was the truth--but Dex is gone, disappearing up the stairs before Nursey can even gather those thoughts enough to form a response. The kitchen is quiet without him, and the Haus feels empty and huge with the rest of the team still at the game. 

* * *

When the team finally piles in, Nursey is still sitting where Dex left him, staring hard at the floor. He lets Bitty dote on him for a few minutes, refuses an offer of pie, accepts a new ice pack to replace the one thawing out on the table where Dex dropped it. It doesn’t help his headache much. 

“Dex is mad at me,” he blurts, startling Bitty out of whatever he’d been saying. Probably something about pie. He blinks in surprise, then lets his expression fall into a caring smile.

“He’s just worried about you, hun,” Bitty soothes, and Nursey sighs. 

“Nah, he’s mad,” he repeats, “I said something stupid again.” 

He hadn’t, really. He doesn’t think it was stupid to tell Dex he cares about him. It might’ve been stupid to almost make a concussion-fueled confession of his dumb crush on his hockey partner, but Dex had taken it the wrong way before he could get that far. So, crisis averted? 

“Go talk to him,” Bitty says after a moment, chewing on his lower lip. He pulls Nursey up out of his chair and hands him the ice pack, then pushes him in the direction of the stairs. 

He makes it up to the bedroom, a little slowly, and finds Dex sitting and glaring at a line of code on his laptop screen. He doesn’t appear to be actually trying to work on it, more just silently fuming. Nursey leans against the doorframe and calls his name. 

“Dex.” No answer. Dex doesn’t even turn to look at him. 

“Poindexter.” Still nothing. He can see Dex staring at him in the reflection on his computer screen, but he barely even twitches in Nursey’s direction.

“Will,” Nursey tries, “please?”

Finally, that gets a response. Dex spins in his desk chair, like some kind of cartoon villain, and it would have been comical if Nursey wasn’t so tired. 

“What.” It comes out flat, and Dex’s gaze is flat, and everything about him is closed off and shut down, and Nursey doesn’t know how to make this better. He tries anyway. 

“I’m sorry,” he manages. “I didn’t-- that wasn’t supposed to be an insult. I wasn’t chirping, or anything.” 

“Okay,” Dex says, and Nursey sees him relax just a fraction. Enough to keep him talking.

“I just, ugh,” he squeezes his eyes shut against his headache, and tries to keep his brain cooperating for like, five more minutes,  _ please _ . “I meant what I said earlier. You’re my partner and I--I care about you, and I don’t like seeing you get hurt. I know I wasn’t thinking, and it was stupid, and that’s not how the play was supposed to go. But the guy was coming right for you, and you didn’t see him, and I would hate for this raging headache to be happening to you instead of me because it sucks ass, big time.” He finishes with an awkward smile, half wince, and reaches up to press the ice pack back to his bruised face. 

“You’re an idiot,” Dex says quietly, for maybe the tenth time that afternoon. Nursey watches him, and his eyes go soft and Nursey knows by now that that means he’s forgiven. He shuffles over to his bed and drops down into the pillows, and if he wasn’t so exhausted, he might’ve thought about how Dex’s ears got a little pink when he called him an idiot. Or how his forehead got that worried little crease when he saw Nursey wince, that he usually reserved for people close to him. But Nursey doesn’t think about any of those things, because he’s focused on keeping his eyes open long enough to watch Dex scoot back to the desk in his chair. 

He thinks instead about how he doesn’t want Dex to get up and leave, like he looks like he might. He wants to tell him that, because he’s on some weird path to admitting things he shouldn’t, but for all his poetry, Nursey can’t seem to find the words. Dex looks at him and seems to understand anyway. 

“Go to sleep, Nurse,” he says, and turns back to his laptop. “I’m not going anywhere.” 

“Chill,” Nursey murmurs, and closes his eyes as the line of code blinks back up. He rolls over, buries his face in his pillow, and falls asleep to the sound of Dex’s fingers on the keyboard. 

**Author's Note:**

> Hope you had as much fun reading this as I did writing it. Leave a comment if you like :)
> 
> come hang with me on [tumblr!](https://nearly-writes.tumblr.com/)


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